It Gets Worse
by rgm0005
Summary: There are some days when it's just not worth getting out of bed, but it can be hard to figure out which days these are. Having said that, if Santa Claus has punched you in the face for no reason and it's not the weirdest thing that happens to you that day? It's one of those days. It is also, sadly, probably too late to go back to sleep.


It's come to my attention that I haven't constructed any particularly convoluted plots lately, nor have I violently ruined the lives of any of my main characters in several months. As I am in possession of an extremely rare medical condition wherein I will _die_ if I do not do such things at regularly intervals, I have put forth an effort to remedy this situation.

More seriously, I have no idea where the hell this thing came from, but I wrote it awhile back because I didn't want to just leave it to rot in my idea files, but it was mainly something I wanted to get out of my head. At the same time, I'm not entirely sure what to do with it exactly, so I figured I'd post it here and get some feedback from it.

Basically, most of the PJO crossovers I've posted so far involve Percy (and potentially his friends) gradually worming their way into the heart of things; learning, growing, and figuring things out in oftentimes desperate situations, but on a large scale ones-like in the DF and PJO books, which take place over months and years. Things are learned, mistakes are made, people grow and develop slowly, etc. There are exception, like HBTS, where the time frame is significantly shorter—but even then, the information available was significant.

But I've used up most of my allotted mercy for this month already, and need what's left for my stories which have several snippets before things go to hell for the characters, so I was thinking, what about the other possibility? What if rather than a slow introduction, they're tossed straight into the deep end? Hell, why not strap them to a missile and fire them straight down into the Mariana's Trench? I've received a number of complaints about Percy being too on top of things, so why not a story where he has no grasp of what's going on at all and is caught completely off guard?

This snippet is just a one-shot, though I might someday come back and make a bigger fic out of it. Not right now, though, because I have so many fics going and some that are still in the works—just don't have time right now.

**It Gets Worse**

"I am…confused," She said, the words seeming to cost her something. "I don't understand what has happened. Who are you? What is going on? I need to know what has happened."

"I assure you," Percy said, facing her seriously. He was getting kind of chilly without his shirt, but she needed it more than he did. "There is no possible way of explaining this convoluted mess in any way that could possibly make you less confused."

"Even so."

"Okay, fine, here we go—but brace yourself for a bunch of confusing shit," Nico said, face serious. There was a hint of wildness in his eyes and he'd been talking strangely for a while now, but again, the last few days had been hell. "So here's what happened. Me and him are just minding our own business and chilling at Percy's place, right? And suddenly there's a knock on our door so we're like 'Hey, who could that be,' and Percy gets up to go check, but the moment he opens the door it's like bam! Fist to the fucking face. I mean, seriously, Evil Future Santa—who we do not, at this point, know is from the future or Santa, but the random punching thing says he's at least a dick, if not evil—just punches him in the face with no warning and runs away. So I run over to help Percy off the ground because, seriously, you should see Santa, the guy is like a bear that learned how to walk like a man. The moment Percy's standing we're both like 'What the fuck was that about?' and getting pissed because seriously, we were just minding our own business and some guy punches us like that? The Hell is up with that. So we rush out after the guy because we're gonna beat the crap out of him and teach him a lesson about how randomly punching people is wrong."

"Bad idea," Percy said, shaking his head. "Like, in the top ten worst ones we've ever had and that is saying something. We had no idea at the time, but apparently Evil Future Santa can fucking see the future or something, so he had everything planned out and we walked right into his trap by leaving my house. And then we walked into his other trap. And his third, fourth, fifth, and sixth ones. And then we found out that on top of seeing the future, Santa is also a badass. Like, ouch. My body was not ready. I seriously thought we were going to die. Thank God that Good Future Santa was there to save us. Well, in hindsight, I mean—at the time he was a huge asshole, but looking back, he saved our bacon. We'd have died if he hadn't shown up and that's if we were lucky."

Nico nodded furiously in agreement.

"So anyway, just as were about to die, this other old man shows up," Percy continues.

"—Remember, we don't know that either of them are Future Santa Claus' yet," Nico interjects. "To say nothing of how they were morally inclined."

"And hits the first guy out of nowhere," Percy continued as if he hadn't been interrupted. "Keeping him from killing us long enough to toss us these crystal orb things and the ground suddenly drops out from beneath us. We didn't know yet, though it became clear pretty damn quickly, but we were being sent to the Future—I don't recommend attempting such a trip unless you're a fan of roller-coasters, which is to say it was pretty damn awesome, but suddenly we're being spat up into this warzone between all sorts of weird guys and monsters and are suddenly fighting for our lives and about to die again."

"But then this other weird guy comes up to us—and this is a different guy from the two Santas—and he looks shocked to see us, though we were pretty shocked to find this weird old man suddenly looking at us with this crystal eye thing, too. But really, the guy was weird. He went from hopeless to shocked to excited to scared to resolved in maybe two seconds before going all 'Come with me if you want to live' and grabbing us and dragging us away. And I swear, it's the Oracle all over again, because in like twenty minutes, he's got us packed and off doing a quest, saying that we had to save the world from something he didn't tell us about."

"Point of fact, the guy didn't explain shit about anything. It was just like 'Here's this letter, go find Ebenezer McCoy, Edinburgh is probably a good place to start, off you go.' In fact, pretty much everyone we met so far was like that—is it something about having magic or something? Are you contractually obligated not to explain anything?" Percy asked, thinking of Mary Poppins. "But we're used to stuff like this and the guy did have a war to fight, so at the time, we figured it could wait until we didn't need to worry about dying. Sadly, we hadn't quite caught on to the fact that if we waited until then, we'd never get an explanation, period. But he calls over this white-haired guy, gives us some basic directions, and all but tosses us out."

"The white-haired guy was some sort of Sidhe, whatever that is," Nico added, taking over. "And he takes us on this trip through a forest, opens a gate in midair, and tosses us out in Scotland. Not having a whole lot of choice, we shadow-travel to Edinburgh—and the place is wrecked enough that we start wondering if there's a war in Scotland that we hadn't heard about—and run around until we find something weird. We end up face to face with some guys with glowing staves who interrogate us until we start taking about the weird guys who sent us here and then demand to see the letter we had, and then, again with no explanation, shuffle us into this underground fortress or something and lock us in a room."

"A few hours later, the guy we're looking for shows up and suddenly we're looking at the guy's soul or something—I guess he's looking at ours, too—and it's a pretty jarring experience, but the guy seems satisfied. He tells us to sit down so he can explain things to us, but something attacks their base or something and these weird alarms start going off before suddenly cutting out, so the guy pales, swears, and stands. He pulls this black staff from out of _nowhere_, plants his feet, and the world drops out from beneath us _again_, but it's different this time. Still fun, though. It feels like something hit us mid-ride though, because we blackout and when we wake up, Scotland looks completely different like it hadn't been through a war, and we're completely lost again. We walk out into the halls and suddenly everyone is rushing towards us and they're pissed that we're there even though it's not our fault, but we mention the guy with the fake eye and Mr. McCoy and we're being locked up again until they can confirm our story, and it's another few hours of waiting until they show up and when they do they're different looking, like their younger and missing scars and stuff, but neither of them recognize us. I think it says a lot about the day we'd been having that, for one thing, our first conclusion was time travel and, for the other, we were right."

"We told them what we suspected and the guy with the fake eye looked at us, hummed once, and nodded like it made complete since, which I'm kind of envious of because it made no sense to me whatsoever. We were about to tell them everything, but Mr. McCoy told us we couldn't, because it could make things even worse, so instead we started playing quite possibly the most annoying game ever. Have you ever played twenty questions? It was like that, only instead of being about actually asking questions, we could only gesture vaguely in the direction of them. We also knew nothing about anything, so we had no idea what to ask in the first place and since we were apparently talking about an event that hadn't happened yet, they wouldn't know anything specific even if we did, but the guy with the fake eye was pretty good at guessing stuff. But they told us a lot, if not exactly what we wanted to know, and we were able to at least get started in what I'm sincerely hoping was the right direction, and they promising to help as best they could from their side of things, and sent us in the direction of Santa from before he turned evil."

"Are we sure that guy was Santa?" Percy wondered out loud. "I mean, he looked pretty different and was missing an eye. And he was pretty nice, all things considered, if annoyingly vague about everything."

"I'm pretty sure," Nico nodded. "There was just something about him."

"Well, future evil Santa or not, he was pretty helpful. He seemed to know a lot about what was going to happen, though what he could tell us was, yeah, annoyingly vague, but he was how we first found out about you, for example, and how we learned the basics that let us figure the rest of this out, and then he pointed us towards these two old ladies in a cabin out in this forest who I swear to God were the Fates. One of them even had those scary scissors. We talked to them for a bit and they were, uh…interesting and…helpful, I guess? They made a lot of things clearer and a lot of things more confusing, but they were the ones who told us that we had to save you or we were all doomed."

"Atropos also told us that we'd _fail_ to save you," Nico murmured. "And, well, I guess she'd know."

Percy glared at him before continuing.

"Anyway, now that we finally knew what we had to do, we headed your way, but I swear, time was _literally_ against us—as in, it took us literal days to make it to you and by the time we did…"

"It was too late," Nico said bluntly. "You were dead and by all appearances, the world was hosed and we'd failed miserably. If you know anything about us though, you probably understand that we weren't quite ready to bend over and take it for the rest of eternity, though, so we, uh…"

"What he's trying to say is that we had it from the mouth of the Fates that we were screwed if you were dead," Percy said. "And you were. So the only solution we could think of was to…bring you back to life. It was, uh…complicated, but, um, here you are so let's call it a success, because isn't it the results that matter? And that's pretty much our story up 'til now, plus or minus a few details and several hundred people trying to kill us."

Percy and Nico looked at each other nervously, grimacing slightly at the memories.

"I will admit," She murmured. "You were right—that was a confusing and ridiculous explanation. But given the circumstances, I have little choice but to believe you. The question is, then, what exactly it is that we need to do now? I'm more aware of the seriousness of this situation than anyone, but as I am now…"

Percy and Nico looked at each other again, grimaces deepening.

"We were kind of, uh…hoping you could tell us." Percy admitted. "Nobody we've met has been able to do more then give us vague hints at what we should do and we really, really need more than vague hints right now, because we are _completely_ lost. We don't know what is happening, or how, or why, and we especially don't know how to stop it. I think—I know—we can still change things, but not if we're stuck swinging randomly in the dark. We need to know what we have to do to save the world."

For a moment, the woman seemed to ponder that, before nodding.

"Very well—if it's knowledge and guidance that you need, then I can still give you that much, even without my Mantle. But I hope you realize that this situation is a dire one—if we do not succeed in this, which we most likely will not, it will mean the end of everything. Everything you value, care about, and know is on the line right now. Do you understand that?"

The two demigods nodded.

"We know that much," Nico said quietly. "And believe me when I say that we'll do anything to prevent this."

"Good," said Mab, former Monarch of the Winter Court. She looked at them both and then at herself.

Two demigod children and a mortal woman fresh from the grave vs. the Apocalypse. She felt a bit cold at the thought and not simply because the chill of the night air was actually affecting her for the first time in millennia.

"Then I hope you're not afraid to get your hands dirty. Desperate times call for desperate measures—and this situation is about as desperate as things can possibly get. We have things to discuss and work to do. Our biggest obstacle at this point in time will most likely be my daughter, the new Queen of Winter, and if we are to have any chance of salvaging this situation, then here is what we must do…"


End file.
